Point-and-click adventures are particular types of adventures, games that rely on narrative and puzzles; they are played with a mouse. In fact, unlike old-school adventures based on text-parser, you mostly perform actions using your mouse.
The first point-and-click adventure game was probably Deja Vu: A Nightmare Comes True!! for the Macintosh, but the title that made the genre famous was Lucasfilm's Maniac Mansion, thanks to Ron Gilbert and the SCUMM engine. Lucasfilm Games later released other hits, like Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, The Secret of Monkey Island, and many others. Sierra introduced a fully point-and-click interface to its adventures with King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder!. The technological advancements introduced 256 color graphics, voice acting, and environmental music, creating a much more immersive experience for this type of game.
Some adventures were less directly inspired by other works of fiction. This puts more strain on the developers to create an engaging and compelling story, as in the Broken Sword series created by Revolution Software.
